arthur's blog

Our workshop at the 2010 United States Social Forum was a great success!  We've set up another website to facilitate continued communication with our participants and anyone generally interested in digital storytelling - check it out: http://ussf.adaptingtoscarcity.org.

We took some of our own footage of the event, hopefully we can piece together a little clip for you all sometime soon.  Also, we will be publishing all of the footage generated during the workshop to the workshop website.

With the hard work and dedication of 60 students, we are a day away from the culmination of our video workshops in El Salto/Juanacatlán and Guadalajara!  We have organized outdoor community screenings for this coming weekend.  If you're around, join us on Friday, the 7th of May from 8:30pm - 10pm in Parque de la Revolución in Guadalajara and Saturday, the 8th of May from 7pm - 10pm in La Plaza de Arriba in El Salto.  On Saturday, there will be snacks, artisans and two local bands playing from 7pm - 9pm followed by the screening of the videos.

We are very excited to announce that adaptingtoscarcity.org just turned 2.0! After months of hard work, design by Jon Doyle and development support by Colingo Labs, LLC, our beautiful new website has officially arrived. In true 2.0 style, there are still some kinks to work out and a few bells and whistles to implement over the next few weeks, but we finally made it :) You can expect a more detailed post about the ins-and-outs of the new site in the next few days - in the meantime, I'm off to celebrate.

Here at Adapting to Scarcity, we strive to be transparent, participatory and community-centered. We believe that lasting, positive change flows from the bottom up and requires open access to information and democratic collaboration. This ethos permeates all of our work - from our documentary and workshops to the information and technology that we create and employ.

While most of our blog posts have been focussed on our experiences here in Mexico, our community organizing and the documentary, a crucial portion of our work happens behind the scenes in front of a computer. We are also building and extending software tools to help people connect, produce and share digital media. And, while it might seem like a bizarre notion to extend the ideas behind our ethos to the process of developing software, we're absolutely doing it.

At this very moment, we're watching Steven Fisher's Adapting to Scarcity fundraiser in Bend, Oregon from afar (thanks technology!). It looks and sounds like a fabulous event - wonderful performers, wonderful costumes and clearly, wonderful people. To help convey what Adapting to Scarcity is about for his fundraiser, we put together a ~5 minute video entitled "Adapting to Scarcity: Who We Are and What We're Up To":

<== Check out our new logo!!! Infinite thanks to the very talented and hardworking Jon Doyle of Jon Doyle Design.

After feedback, constructive criticism and more time on the ground, we've decided to amend our mission statement. Without further ado:

We thought it would be a good idea to take a step back and share a brief overview of the communities around Guadalajara that we're working with.  At the moment, there are three:

• La Huizachera
• El Salto/Juanacátlan
• Temacapulín

While they are geographically disparate and are facing their own unique issues, they are all a part of the Río Santiago watershed.  To get a better sense of the area and the communities we're working with, be sure to check out the map at the end of the post!

We finally sat down and hammered out the official mission for Adapting to Scarcity.  It's been guiding us since the beginning - it just took us some time to put into words.

Our mission is to empower and connect communities adapting to water scarcity.  By providing technical infrastructure to leverage social media, we facilitate participatory, grassroots organizing within and between local communities on a global scale.

As we count down the hours to our departure, we paused today to inventory our documentary equipment. It's been arriving piece by piece over the last few weeks, making it feel a bit like Christmas around here. Now that nearly all of it has arrived, we thought we'd tell you a little bit about it.

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself - consider it an e-handshake: my name is Arthur Richards and I am the co-director of Adapting to Scarcity.

Since the inception of Adapting to Scarcity, I've helped Sarah flesh out some of the overarching ideas and goals of the project. Over the past few months, I've taken on a more integral role; helping to make bigger decisions about direction, logistics and the technologies we'll be using. Due to previous professional obligations and time constraints, my presence and influence has been primarily behind the scenes. Now, I have taken the plunge and am fully immersed in the project.